כי לא מחשבותי מחשבותיכם

כִּי לֹא מַחְשְׁבוֹתַי מַחְשְׁבוֹתֵיכֶם, וְלֹא דַרְכֵיכֶם דְּרָכָי

Monday, November 11, 2013

Thought of the Day

I haven't been blogging lately since most of the online OTD conversation has moved to Facebook. Nevertheless, I feel that some stuff is better published in blogs before it is buried under the Facebook posts.This little mussar droshah was posted by my good pal Chay and reposted her with his permission...

So let me get this straight:

You want to tell me that there's a unknowable and unlimited Creator who made the entire universe and its billions and billions of stars and planets, for the sake of a small group of beings called humans, and this Creator made sure to keep His role in this creation as ambiguous and uncertain as possible (far less than, say, the existence of your hand or China) only hinting here and there in very unclear ways that He was the one behind it all, making certain that His existence could always be questioned (expect for the select few who claim that He revealed Himself to them, but we are expected not to believe individuals like this anyway).

And this Creator gave a book to all humanity, a manual of how best to live life, but in His infinite wisdom only gave it to a tiny subset of those humans, a group of nomads in the desert, around 3000 years before any proper tools of recording existed for the masses (like the ball point pen and the video recorder), when people had no serious method of confirming or denying stories they were told and very limited methods of discovering reality. And this event clearly and obviously happened despite significant archeological, historical, anthropological evidence to the contrary.

And that in this book there are hundreds of special rules given only to that small subset of humanity, in addition to the general ones given to all humanity. And in this book are thousands of opposing opinions as to what exactly WERE the rules that this Creator actually gave. And the specific group YOU happen to have been born into knows exactly which version of rules is the actually true one, though you have no way of proving and knowing with any certainty that this is true (maybe Satmer is right, or maybe Chabad, or maybe Reconstructionist, or maybe Islam?)

And that this Creator expects me to live my entire life (even giving up life itself if need be) based on this book, giving all my efforts and time to serving this impossibly unknowable Creator. And if I follow this rule book I will become ever closer and similar to this ultimate goodly Creator, though I will have no way of confirming this while still alive (and maybe even after death - who knows?). And if I do NOT follow this rule book this Creator will punish me severely (and this will not necessarily happen while I’m alive), despite my serious doubts about your whole claim, though I have no way of really knowing if I’m actually keeping the rules correctly. And yet, you consider this Creator to be the most loving and caring being in existence, creating this whole reality for my ultimate good.

And you seriously consider your understanding to be the most likely and sane one available???

- You think that given a little time a pile of worms will turn into people.- You think that free will is an illusion and no person should be honestly, sincerely praised or condemned for anything which he does.

And you seriously think that your understanding is the most sane one available!